The awards will announced in Brisbane on Wednesday 25 October. The announcement will be preceded by a keynote address from Heinrich Wolff, Wolff Architects, South Africa, entitled ‘Network Systems.’ Heinrich’s work has been recognized with a Daimler Chrysler Award for South African Architecture and the RIBA Lubetkin Award. He has held several academic appointments including as adjunct associate professor at UCT, Cape Town and as a visiting professor at the ETH in Zürich, IUAV in Venice and Washington University in St Louis. In September he was the inaugural Charles Correa Chair for architecture at the University of Goa, India, teaching an urban design workshop called Urban Externalities.

The Australian Urban Design Awards program was established as the Australia Award for Urban Design in 1996 and was created by then-prime minister Paul Keating’s Urban Design Task Force. Malcolm Turnbull, prime minister of Australia, and Lucy Turnbull, former lord mayor of Sydney and chief commissioner of the Greater Sydney Commission, are both patrons of the awards. Past patrons include former prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.